Boost your email marketing campaign! Emojis as visual stimuli to influence customer engagement
Journal of Research in Interactive Marketing
ISSN: 2040-7122
Article publication date: 11 April 2022
Issue publication date: 4 May 2023
Abstract
Purpose
In an effort to evaluate if and how emojis might boost customer engagement in email marketing, the current research aims to analyzes emojis' effects and investigates how certain features, such as the type of emoji or the way of emojis' presentation (repetition and position), moderate their effectiveness.
Design/methodology/approach
This research comprises four experimental studies. The first two analyze whether the presence and the type of emoji (facial vs non-facial) influence customer engagement. Then, two more studies analyze the influence of the presence and type of emoji, as well as repetitions (repetition vs no repetitions) and positions (left vs right). The data collection is through email marketing campaigns, with two types of brands. The analysis is a fractional factorial design in one- and two-way interactions to identify the influence of presentation features.
Findings
Emojis influence customer engagement and can trigger interactive behaviors and increase customer engagement, even in a channel that generally is less prone to interaction. The emojis increase the probability of opening the email, the number of times email gets opened and clicks to access additional content.
Research limitations/implications
The varied results suggest the need for more research to confirm the findings regarding presentation features. This research offers novel implications for interactive marketing and the theory of visual rhetoric because the research establishes how visual stimuli such as emojis can persuade and capture customer attention and increase customer engagement.
Practical implications
Practitioners can optimize email marketing by using emojis strategically to attract audience interest, provoke interactions, build relationships and generate word of mouth, leading to better consumer experiences, loyalty and brand profitability.
Originality/value
Most studies use semantic analysis to analyze emojis; the current study instead tests whether emojis can increase customer engagement in a less-interactive channel and then also considers the moderating role of several emoji-relevant variables. In addition, the authors apply the theory of visual rhetoric to explicate the original findings, which are gathered from a unique data set involving real marketing campaigns.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank SolucionWeb for their helpful assistance in conducting the study.
This research was funded by the Spanish Research, Development and Innovation Program funds through research project PID2020-113469GB-100.
Citation
Valenzuela-Gálvez, E.S., Garrido-Morgado, Á. and González-Benito, Ó. (2023), "Boost your email marketing campaign! Emojis as visual stimuli to influence customer engagement", Journal of Research in Interactive Marketing, Vol. 17 No. 3, pp. 337-352. https://doi.org/10.1108/JRIM-02-2021-0033
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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